We haven't written much so far but we have made some progress. We have designed the game and worked out a lot of the implementation.

Right, going solo into this was a bad idea. Real life gets in the way too much. Asset generation is also a time sink. A fun time sink but it pulls me away from the code too much. Any last minute 3d art help? Plzkthx?

Here's robot in the game engine. I haven't set up the shaders yet, if I have the time there's going to be a bloom there. Not looking likely though.

Got the game code in there now, so the little scoop up front will snag the visually appropriate samples (reddish dots) on the trench wall, which will load up (lower left hand bar) til its full, at which point you have to bring back to the surface research ship. Also added battery power, which runs down as you use thrusters and the light in the deep, which adds to the existing hull damage meter. Also added "signal strength", a wifi type meter that shows you how your connection is to the research vessel. As this runs down you start to lose control of your sub, but thats where the most fascinating samples lie! All in all the game is really shaping up.. eeeexcept, i am really pushing pygame's blitting to the limit. This thing hogs memory and cpu on my core2duo laptop. I might need to do an emergency port to pyglet to take advantage of opengl soon, but i am putting it off until I have the whole game wrapped up. Its just too much fun hacking this thing together!

Alright, so I thought 4 robots in one game would be too much for me, but it turns out I'm actually doing a lot better than I thought I would be. I have a climb, gravity, speed, and regular robot. No projectiles coming from the robots and the player yet, but that will be happening very soon. I also have the GUI almost fully working (all the icons are in place.) Tomorrow should be some real gameplay, then some art, sound effects (courtesy of sfxr :D ), then some polishing and tweaking, then Saturday I shouldn't be cramming. Woooot.

Wowsa - so much to say, so little brain-power to say it :P

Today Markus, nihilocrat, OrenMyst and I were all hitting the game at the same time - more or less.
Which is cool.

We now have the battle engine complete - assuming we don't add captains or formation cards.
Selected territories are now highlighted.
Several nasty bugs were fixed.
But several more added :(
We have a game that Markus and I have both played several times through - and it is fun :D :D
We have music and some not place-holder-art done :D
You gain troops elsewhere besides capitols - based on your number of connected territories.
You can zoom in and out - though we need to get the sprites to scale along with that ;)
You can win without crashing.

I was also planning on starting and maybe finishing the multi-player tonight - but after looking at that list I'm happy enough with our progress:D
Tomorrow *must* see the multiplayer thoguh - or we are in deep crud and will have to abandon that idea!

New screenie - slightly out-dated - all place-holders ;)
Green Attacking Pink ;)


And for the first time ever we have a really enjoyable pyweek game :D
I think this is the first time I've ever taken time away from development to actually play a game - and this is only the half-way mark :D

I haven't really been doing much, so last night I did some work and made a bunch of tiles for our game.

Alex made this cool editor that allows me to drag tiles from one window onto our game map, it makes building the level quick n' easy (and fun!).

The image above shows a sample of tiles I made last night.

Well, I think it's time to make it official. I'm not going to be able to make it this time for Pyweek. There's a lot of things I could blame for it, but the biggest is my heart isn't in it this time around. Lots of things are going on with work, and honestly, Pyweek isn't the escape I was hoping it would be. Apologies for those of you who were hoping something good might come from this. No one is more disappointed than I that it's not going to happen this time around.

Unfortunately our first plan was far to epic to attempt in one week, so we had to fall back on a second idea utilising the exact same engine. Here's a completely originial story excerpt:

John Stalvern waited. The lights above him blinked and sparked out of the air. There were robots in the base. He didn't see them, but had expected them now for years. His warnings to Cernel Joson were not listenend to and now it was too late. Far too late for now, anyway.
John was a post-apocalyptic survivor for fourteen years. When he was young he watched the giant machines and he said to dad "I want to fight giant machines daddy."
Dad said "No! You will BE KILL BY ROBOTS"
There was a time when he believed him. Then as he got oldered he stopped. But now in the bunker base he knew there were robots.
"This is Joson" the radio crackered. "You must fight the robots!" So John gotted his shootgun and blew up the wall.
"HE GOING TO KILL US" said the robots
"I will shoot at him" said the cyberrobot and he fired the rocket missiles. John shooted at him and tried to blew him up. But then the ceiling fell and they were trapped and not able to kill.
"No! I must kill the robots" he shouted
The radio said "No, John. You are the robots"
And then John was a cyborg.

Today I finally got the game editor (and game, actually) functional enough to start entering rooms into the text adventure. The editor actually is the same as the text adventure game, but adds a few commands, like name and desc, to allow the entering of rooms into the game database. Also, if you move in a direction where a room wasn't already present, a new room is whipped up for editing.

There's still going to be some nasty SQL work to insert a few more details, like non-player characters. Also, since the game isn't necessarily a grid, some rooms will need to be manually connected in the database.

A little behind schedule, but definitely moving forward.

Hehehe... This is our robot's dance...